culture

My Sister Sarah: A #BCLawImpact Story

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / Leave a comment

Not long after graduating from college my sister, Sarah, who recently entered her 30s, found herself at a convent in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, helping the nuns run an orphanage. She wasn’t taking vows, but she was beginning, unbeknownst to her, a life path focused on service to others. She has spent the bulk of the past five years working for the Human Resources department for Doctors Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontiers, MSF).

When I think of HR, I think of Toby from the show The Office. That was not my sister’s HR. She spent months working in Kurdistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Haiti again, to name a few. These are not vacation destinations, and that’s in part what drew her to the work: the ability to go into Afghanistan to work with and learn from a culture that most folks will never get to experience. Her HR department is likely unlike those that you have worked with. One of her first assignments was to maintain a list of every employee’s location for MSF’s entire 120-person mission in South Sudan, in case they needed to evacuate the country. Every day, she would email or call to each field hospital to see who was moving where, so that if disaster struck and the entire team needed to leave the country quickly, they could. She was barely twenty-four.

This week, the Impact blog is showcasing those people in our lives who have made an impact on us, who have helped us arrive at where we are today, and who keep us motivated towards our goals in the future. If you want to share a story about that person in your life, join us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and post your story using the hashtag #BCLawImpact. Students from the Law Students Association (LSA) and the blog will be in the Yellow Room on Thursday at lunch with a BC Law backdrop and a dry-erase board so you can take a picture with a message thanking someone who has made an impact on you and post it. We will post some of our favorite pictures and messages on the blog, and they will be collected in a Tagboard.

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Veterans: BC Law has Your Six

/ Brendan McKinnon / 1 Comment

Above photo is the BC Veteran’s Memorial “dedicated to the memory of Boston College alumni who died in service to their country.”

Two days into a trip from Boston to the Panama Canal, my Coast Guard cutter tucked into a harbor off Long Island to anchor while we waited out a winter storm. Like most of the crew, I took advantage of what might be my last hours of American cell phone service for three months to text family members and obsessively refresh my email. I stood on the flight deck and felt a momentary reprieve from the wind and snow whipping my face as I read the subject line, “Congratulations from BC Law.”

My first reaction was an embarrassing combination of shock and fist pumps directed in no particular direction. My second reaction was a sobering, “Now what?” After ten years in the military I’d grown accustomed to having a checklist and pre-planned response card for everything I did, now I was temporarily severing my connection to the outside world without any idea how I’d prepare or pay for law school. I didn’t know what kind of help to ask for, much less who to ask for it.

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The One Shift That Could Change the War on Drugs

/ Brendan McKinnon / Leave a comment

After I wrote about the failures of the War on Drugs for BC Law Magazine last semester I waited anxiously for the backlash. I spent ten years in the U.S. Coast Guard before law school, six of them chasing international drug cartels at sea, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the most professional and dedicated military and law enforcement personnel in the world. I was terrified about how they’d respond when I called the drug war a “lost cause,” and it took less than a day for the responses to start flooding my inbox. The volume wasn’t surprising, but the content shocked me.

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Que esta passant aqui?

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / Leave a comment

Walking the streets of Barcelona with my father used to involve a mild amount of embarrassment. In the city, where he was born and raised, and where most residents speak both Catalan and Spanish, there is a social convention: If you speak to someone you don’t know in Catalan, and they respond in Spanish, you should follow their cue and switch to Spanish because they do not speak Catalan.  When someone responded to my father’s Catalan in Spanish, he persisted in Catalan.  Sometimes they would call him out, explicitly telling him that they did not speak Catalan.  Sometimes he would respond, “But we are in Catalunya.”  I would stand by, hand blocking my face, hoping the interaction would end quickly.  After seeing the national police bludgeon citizens throughout Catalonia with truncheons in a feeble attempt to block the October 1 independence referendum, I have a harder time seeing my father’s obstinacy as embarrassing.

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What Exactly Is Art Law, Anyway?

/ Marcus Nemeth / Leave a comment

I’m pleased to host a guest post from Samantha O’Neal, one of the leaders of BC Law’s Art Law Society.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that a college student majoring in Classics and Archaeology will be the subject of much familial concern and consternation, especially if that student has little desire to actually be an archaeologist. I was one of those students. Few moments can be as uncomfortable as your friends’ parents staring at you while wondering aloud, “But what are you going to do with that?” as they try to mask their sympathy for my poor, long-suffering parents who would probably be supporting me forever thanks to my desire to study a “dead” language (I’ll forego listing the merits of a Classical education for the moment.)

I had the great fortune to be born to parents who, while most certainly long-suffering, champion the Liberal Arts education. They always figured that, regardless of what I wanted to do, I would either need to go to grad school or be trained on the job, so why not study something I was actually interested in? But I never saw undergrad as some carte blanche to major in anything I wanted. Rather, it was an important step in my journey to studying museums and cultural property law.

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BC Law: The Happiest Place on Earth?

/ Erika Craven / 1 Comment

When I first heard BC Law called “the Disneyland of law schools” during my 1L orientation, I was surprised. How can a law school – something that is grueling and competitive by nature—be likened to the widely proclaimed “happiest place on earth?” My only experience with law school was limited to the crazed mumblings of relatives in legal professions and of friends struggling through their own intensely cutthroat law school experiences. Before classes began I had been preparing myself to be swallowed by a writing-intensive version of the Hunger Games. “Keep your head on a swivel” was the sage warning from my dad as I set off on my new venture.

But I also found the Disney analogy comforting and personally appropriate. I recently retired from three years touring as a professional figure skater for Disney on Ice, where I had been actually living in this Disney dreamland. Disney was something familiar. I wanted to know more.

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Arming Underrepresented Communities with Legal Power

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / Leave a comment

I’m pleased to host a guest post from 2L Yetunde Buraimoh, discussing the Black Law Student Association’s recent “Know Your Rights” training.

When I sat down with the Black Law Students Association’s  (BLSA) E-board last spring to plan programming for the 2017-18 academic year, we unanimously agreed that it was necessary to increase BLSA’s presence in the greater Boston community. Given our nation’s current social climate, particularly the increased exposure of police brutality, we felt that it was crucial to facilitate programming that would equip individuals in over-policed communities with the knowledge necessary to make the best decisions for their safety.

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“How Is That NOT Hearsay?” and Other Ways to Think Like a Lawyer

/ Brendan McKinnon / Leave a comment

There are few things cooler for an 11-year-old kid than getting to stay up later than your siblings to watch an R-rated movie, so I vividly remember hopping on the couch with my dad to watch Crimson Tide in 1995. I clung to a pillow with wide-eyed excitement as the USS ALABAMA and a Russian submarine fired torpedoes at each other while Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman squared off with a nuclear war on the line.

At the movie’s tense climax, my dad, a Navy veteran, turned to me dead serious and said, “That guy’s wearing the wrong collar devices.”

My first reaction was “stop talking during the movie so I can see if the submarine sinks,” but my next thought was “how can he possibly know that?” I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but my dad’s time in the Navy had left him with attention to detail that he couldn’t turn off.  It was impossible for him to watch the movie without critiquing the uniforms, lingo, and behavior of the sailors after it had been so ingrained in him by his supervisors and experience.

That’s what 1L does to BC Law students.

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Here’s Why I Wouldn’t Go to Law School Anywhere Else

/ Brianna Marshall / Leave a comment

I’m very pleased to host a guest blog today from 2L Vaishali Goyal. Vaishali has been a staff writer for the Law Review and served as President of the American Constitution Society. She can be reached at goyalv@bc.edu.

Like many, I decided to attend BC Law for the community. But it was not just the student community I came for; I came to BC Law because of what BC did for me and for my family during my senior year of college.

Senior year, right after spring break, I had an unexpected and life threatening brain bleed. I was in the hospital for a month and a half.

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